Good physical fitness is crucial to maintaining good health and fighting disease. Medical evidence has suggested that exercise is instrumental in the pursuit of well-being and longevity. Motivation plays a significant role in one's interest in continuous and productive exercise. Although exercise videos, programming, and literature abound, many people quickly lose interest in such short-term motivational tools. Such conventional exercise enhancements often fail to provide the requisite appeal or feedback needed to keep an individual motivated in a given exercise regimen. Thus, the proper motivators play a significant role in fitness perseverance.
Various fitness feedback tools can provide some level of motivation. For example, heart rate monitors are often used by individuals when engaging in an exercise activity. This feedback, in the form of a physiological measurements of the individual's heartbeat, may help the individual train at the proper level and/or reinforce the individual's notion of training hard. Other monitors such as a fat monitor can motivate individuals by enabling the immediate and spontaneous assessment of the individual's progress towards a goal. These types of devices thereby provide some level of motivation to engage, or continue to engage, in the activity.
Another fitness tool that has been used is a pedometer. Generally, a pedometer tracks the number of steps taken by an individual, and in some cases can calculate a distance walked if the average step length is also known. While a pedometer is a useful tool, it provides only raw count or distance data and is unimaginative. There is no correlation of the data to other information, or use of the data for anything other than the steps or corresponding distance.
Accordingly, there is a need for manners of heightening motivation in walking, jogging, etc. There is also a need to enhance the appeal of information provided by devices such as pedometers or other count/distance measuring devices. The present invention fulfills these and other needs, and offers other advantages.